Rockcrawling - Rock Racing

1/15At the XRRA event in Moab, Utah, the format was a side-by-side race over a man-made course with each competitor in his own lane, so it's not wheel to wheel. Each racer got two passes in each lane, then the direction was reversed and they got two more passes. The six low qualifiers went to a final round where the winner was determined based on best e.t. over two passes, one in each direction.

We almost wish we could see your face right now. You turned the page and instantly wondered what this weird 4x4 junk was doing in HOT ROD magazine. The closed-minded probably didn't even read this far but quickly flipped past this story, back to the comfortable world of bolt-on street machines. The real hot rodders are still with us right now, wondering what's going on and looking for ways to shift the ideas on these pages onto their own rides. Real hot rodders are all about considering a vehicular situation and making it bigger, louder, faster, and stronger. That's what's happening here.

The history of the four-wheeling hobby follows a progression similar to that of mainstream hot rodding. It starts, familiarly, with World War II vets. Many came home with memories of the little Willys and Ford flatfender Jeeps that served beyond the call of duty all over the world; as Willys ads of the time stated, "The sun never sets on the mighty Jeep." They were the hot rods of opportunity in motor pools; Wally Parks was involved with a V-8 swap into an early Bantam jeep (not Jeep) during his time in the Philippines.

Guys like him came home and bought surplus Jeeps or the new Willys Civilian Jeeps (CJs) and hit the trails. Stories of four-wheeling events hit the pages of HOT ROD magazine, and an aftermarket sprung up thanks to guys such as Arthur Warn (of hubs fame), Pete Condos (Con-Ferr), Vic Hickey (general hero), and others, many of whom were seen in HRM with their 4x4 creations. Off-road racing took off in the late '60s and countless hot rodders signed up, including Mickey Thompson, Bill Stroppe, Ak Miller, Parnelli Jones, and even Don Prudhomme and Jim Garner.

2/15One of our favorite buggies was that of Third-Place finisher Levi Shirley. The asymmetrical rig is powered by an Eaton-blown, midmounted GM 3.8L V-6. Note the extreme axle articulation and the attention to high ground clearance with a low center of gravity.

Then in the '70s, it seems the number of multi-interest hot rodders waned as motorsports became more specialized. Meanwhile, the launching of niche magazines divided the hobbyists into increasingly exclusionary factions: 4-Wheel & Off-Road readers were four-wheelers, Car Craft readers were street machiners, and Street Rodder readers were, duh, street rodders. Perhaps HOT ROD had the readership with the greatest range of interests, but even the mother ship has only occasionally drifted into off-road editorials since the '70s. Of course, the story you're reading now is also a random peek that's unlikely to be repeated, but it's a view that demands some consideration.

It's the story of rock racing, a new kink that has grown over the past several years and that can draw a line directly to those flatfender Jeeps that first hit the Rubicon Trail just after the War. Trail riding saw a spike in popularity in the '80s and quickly grew with increasingly severe levels of rockcrawling in the '90s. At that time, most of the trail rigs were Jeep flatfenders, CJ-5s and -7s, and newer Wranglers that were modified with bolt-on parts. The aftermarket development of beefy, low-geared, high-clearance transfer cases and axles and of high-travel suspension systems quickly outgrew the confines of production sheetmetal bodies. Guys started to cut away those bodies to make room for ever-larger tires and more radical wheel travel. Custom-fabricated suspensions and rollcages became more commonplace.

Then came 1997 and Soni Honegger's Scorpion Mk1 (see www.scorpion4x4.com). It may not have been the very first full-tube-chassis trail rig built entirely of imagination and with zero OE chassis components and no bodywork, but it was the most capable and radical of the time, and it started a revolution. All of a sudden, 4x4 shops were cranking out what became known as rock buggies. Where the Scorpion was large and small-tired by today's standards, the newer rock buggies kept getting smaller, lighter, faster, and more capable of attacking larger and hairier obstacles.

3/15Joachim Schweisow runs out of Twisted Customs in Box Elder, South Dakota. His rig is larger and comfier than most for street and trail duty but was still good enough to place Fifth in Moab. The buggy is powered by a 5.3L GM engine that was surplus from a local spec circle track series. Twisted Customs sells five or six similar cars a year for around $60,000 to $70,000 depending on options.

While all this vehicular development was going on, the competition urges crept in. For decades, trail riding was a relaxing family activity, sort of like a rod run. In the mid-'80s, Off-Road magazine's Moses Ludel attempted to start a 4x4 trials competition, sort of like the precision trials motorcycle events. But it was too soon and did not catch on. Later, around the time that the Scorpion debuted, a guy named Bob Hazel was running off-road adventure competitions that involved mud obstacle courses, along with shooting, bike riding, and rowing.

He wanted coverage in 4-Wheel & Off-Road, but the editors were not interested in the iron-man stuff. They wanted a vehicle-only rock competition, but corporate restrictions prevented them from holding an event of their own. So they sketched some rockcrawling rules and told Hazel, "Do this and we'll be there." He did, and the result was the very first modern rock competition, the '98 BFGoodrich Rock Crawling Championship held in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The top three placers in that event were based on production Jeep CJ-7s. Winning combinations soon moved away from production-based rigs as the competitions abandoned low-speed driving elegance while adding faster and more radical obstacles.

Rock-competition sanctioning bodies quickly popped up and disappeared just as rapidly. Today, the players in rockcrawling are the World Extreme Rock Crawling Championship Series (W.E.Rock), ProRock, and RRock. The similar but faster rock racing series are run by the Xtreme Rock Racing Association (XRRA), New Jersey Xtreme Off-Road (NJXOR), and X2 Rock Racing. There are also one-time racing events called King of the Hill in Florette, Alabama, and one held on the Sledgehammer and Jackhammer trails in Johnson Valley, California, called King of the Hammers.

With all these venues, you could say that rock competition is either in flux or it's just spreading wide. With some of the races held on man-made courses, it soon will move to indoor arenas for better spectator appeal.

4/15This one is having tire spin issues due to breakage in the front axle (all the competitors run locked diffs). However, in some cases, racers will spin tires on rocks to improve traction, just like heating up drag slicks with a burnout. Specialized soft-compound tires are made for rock competition. Most run 37- to 40-inch tires, but some racers use 44s or, rarely, 54s.

For us, the interest is not just the violent action but the vehicles themselves. We visited the Maxxis Tires-sponsored XRRA race in Moab, Utah, in April 2009 to investigate them and get the photos seen in this story. We saw rigs built with amazing concepts and fabrication. It reminded us of NHRA's ancient motto of Ingenuity in Action, back when new ideas were accepted rather than counter-regulated. Every rock rig is different, and almost all of them have drivetrain configurations and suspension layouts as unique as the fabricators themselves. One of the things we thought would make rock racing palatable to the HRM audience is the fact that most of them use GM Gen III and Gen IV V-8s and shriek with big power, but we also saw supercharged V-6s and even an inline-four leaned over on its side and dry-sumped. One rig had a Cadillac Northstar V-8 mounted to its stock front-wheel-drive transaxle, but it was mounted sideways in the buggy so the axles that used to feed two front wheels now delivered power fore and aft to the axles. While most rock rigs use aftermarket Atlas transfer cases from Advance Adapters, the transaxle final-drive ratio acted as the low-range gearing in the case of the Northstar setup. We didn't see a single manual trans, but the automatic transmissions range from TH400s to C4s to shortie dragster-style Powerglides. These guys take elements from all sorts of motorsports and apply them for their own purposes.

We kind of hope you'll do the same. Eyeball these buggies and ask yourself how these concepts can be applied to your life. Fabrication seems to be a dying art with the average hot rodder, but these 4x4 guys fear no tube bender or welder. Why not start with a $600 pile of tubing and make your own two-seat, street/strip, bare-bones drag buggy? It would be cheap, unique, and fast. The same could be said for a killer road-race buggy.